Shanghai’s Cathedral School for Girls: A Ballerina, A Sci-Fi Author, and Mao

Well, well. They’re refurbishing the Cathedral School for Girls on Avenue Haig/Huashan Lu, and look who’s popped up over the entrance!

The posh Cathedral School for Girls (sister school to the Cathedral School for Boys) was established around 1918 on Yates Road/Shimen Yi Lu and moved to the Avenue Haig premises in 1931. The 1934 Shanghai Directory lists 6 form mistresses, 4 kindergarten mistresses, a singing mistress, games mistress, French mistress, and science mistress.

Famous Cathedral alumni include Peggy Hookham, who left Shanghai in 1933 to study ballet seriously, and became the world-famous ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn. (Her father worked for British-American Tobacco, whose building still stands on Museum Road/Huqiu Road).

Left: Peggy Hookham and her mother, Hilda, Shanghai, July 1931 (photo: Visualising China). Right: Dame Margot Fonteyn in Swan Lake.

Following the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the Cathedral Boys School occupied part of the Girls’ School premises; students included Empire of the Sun author JG Ballard, who memorably describes going through the abandoned and notorious Del Monte Casino, opposite the school, in his memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography.

The Mao portraits were added during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and since both Peggy Hookham and JG Ballard left well before the arrival of the Communists in 1949, neither would have passed under Mao’s beaming countenance to get to Latin class.

In 1952, the Cathedral Girls School buildings became the Children’s Art Theater of the China Welfare Institute, which they remain today.

Cathedral School for Girls / 643 Huashan Road